02 September 2018 1:34 AM

Why does our new power elite hate lifelong marriage so much? Why does the legal arm of that elite, the Supreme Court, hand out what is left of the privileges of marriage to those who won’t get married, as it did with the widowed parents’ allowance on Thursday?

Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking.

They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.

Our modern upper crust hate marriage because it is a fortress of private life. They hate it above all because they can’t control it, because it is the place where the next generation learn how to be distinct, thinking individuals instead of conformist robots.

It is where they discover the truth about the past, the lore of the tribe, the traditions and beliefs that make us who we are. It is where they become capable of being free.

But our new rulers don’t want that. They don’t want fully formed people who know who they are and where they come from. They want obedient, placid consumers, slumped open-mouthed in front of screens, drugged into flaccid apathy (legally or illegally, the Government don’t care which), slaving all hours in the dreary low-wage, high-tax economy they are so busily creating.

Much better if they’ve never heard of the great golden drama of our national history and literature, so they don’t know what they’re missing and don’t care.

They would prefer the young to be brought up in a sort of moral car park, knowing nothing except what they are told by authority and the advertising industry. In this brave new world, sex is a spectacle and a sport, solemn oaths are worthless, and duty is a joke.

In this, they are much like the Soviet Communists, who deliberately made divorce as easy as crossing the road, and made absolutely sure that hardly any parents could afford to stay at home to raise their own children.

They have not yet gone quite as far as them – Soviet children were encouraged to worship, as a martyr, a semi-mythical figure called Pavlik Morozov, who was supposedly killed by his grandfather after informing on his own parents to the secret police. Russian friends of mine brought up in this vicious cult shuddered at the memory. But if you look carefully, you will see a ghostly shadow of this culture of denunciation growing up in our midst. And, as we forget all our long history of freedom and justice, it will become easier for such things to happen.

After all, we have long been used to the sight, on TV, of police officers smashing down front doors, or conducting dawn raids – and of being expected to approve of it.

An Englishman’s home is not his castle. And his life is not his own. That is what all this means, and will mean. Amid the grunts and the creaking of bedsprings, and the pompous phrases of the judges, listen hard and you can hear them weaving Britain’s winding sheet.

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Kitty's dangerous sign of the times

I am sure Lady Kitty Spencer simply cannot have been aware that the necklace in which she poses is designed to resemble marijuana leaves, or why it matters.

The leaves are one of the favourite emblems of the huge, billionaire-backed covert campaign to make this dangerous hard drug acceptable. Quite possibly, she does not know of the alarming and ever-growing evidence that the use of marijuana is correlated with incurable mental illness and severe violence. Surely, nobody who grasps this can want to help in any way in any campaign to make this terrible, life-ruining drug even more available than it already is?

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The Concrete Party's desecration of beauty

A gloomy, grey shadow now falls across what has until now been an unspoiled part of our beautiful country. I have often bicycled across the quiet counties that lie between Oxford and Cambridge, and found great peace there. It is the intensely English countryside through which John Bunyan tramped as he imagined his great book The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its Celestial City and its Delectable Mountains.

They soon won’t be delectable any more. Our Government, which seems to have sold its soul to the developers, is on the brink of ordering the building there of something called the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, another hideous stripe of concrete which will tear up trees and scar hills, and create a long, wide corridor of noise, stink and light pollution.Everyone knows that such roads solve nothing, and simply attract more traffic. But they will make billions for the builders of box homes in ugly, bare estates alongside the new road.

Yet the decision already seems to have been taken. Did anyone who voted for this Government think they were voting for the desecration of English beauty? The ‘Conservative’ Party should be forced to change its name to the Concrete Party.

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I must just mention that David Katz, the most recent rampage killer in the USA, was taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’. I do so because nobody else is making this connection. Almost all such killers have been taking one of three types of mind-altering drugs – SSRIs, steroids and marijuana. Why don’t we care?

***

I am always tickled by the cultural cringes broadcasters and others make towards certain countries. The worst is the grovelling way we call Peking ‘Beijing’, because it pleases the Chinese despots whom we fear so much.

Logically, if we had to call all foreign places by the names they use themselves, we’d need to call Dublin ‘Baile atha Cliath’ and refer to Moscow as ‘Moskva’. But we don’t. It’s oddly selective, and has something to do with political correctness. So when everyone thought Aung San Suu Kyi was a modern saint we started to call Burma ‘Myanmar’ and Rangoon ‘Yangon’. Now she turns out not to be so nice, can we please go back to ‘Burma’ and ‘Rangoon’?

***

The scene of the worst and most shameless racial violence yet seen in modern Germany was the city now known as Chemnitz. Interesting to record that until very recently it was known as Karl Marx City. It’s in the former Marxist east that most of the worst trouble has happened. But 40 years of rigid communism doesn’t seem to have bred tolerance. The Left aren’t as anti-racist as they think they are.

***

Where does the border lie between fiction and fact? The head of MI5, in the BBC’s new thriller Bodyguard, is called Stephen Hunter-Dunn. Can he be related to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, ‘burnished and furnished by Aldershot sun’, the heroine of John Betjeman’s poem about love and tennis? Well, no he can’t because Joan Hunter Dunn (who I thought was invented by the poet) was a real person, a doctor’s daughter who laughed when Betjeman showed her what he had written. Not MI5 material, I think.

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27 November 2017 4:31 PM

I thought this might be the moment for a discussion of what people think they have read as opposed to what they actually have read. This is partly stimulated by correspondence about bicycle helmets, and partly by my current dispute with Britain’s great liberal newspaper, ‘The Guardian’ (sometime motto, ‘Facts are sacred but comment is free’) and its writer , Deborah Orr.

Ms Orr asserted in an article for that paper that I had used the words “squawking women”. In the print edition, the alleged words appeared in quotation marks. Thus

‘Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, vouchsafed that the "squawking women" would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were.’

When I complained, the paper (eventually) published my letter pointing out that I hadn’t said the words, and explaining why I wouldn’t and couldn’t have done so. I don’t know if they would have published it anyway. All I do know is that they did publish it several days after I submitted it, and also after I made a phone call pointing out that I had been directly misquoted and it was normal, in such cases, to give the person a chance to reply.Here is the letter:

If they had published the letter and deleted the false quotation online, that would have been more or less all right. But when they altered the online version of the article, they did *not* remove the offending words, as I believe they should have done. Instead, they changed them very subtly, to read ‘Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, in a spectacular reversal of reality, vouchsafed that the “squawking” women would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were.’

Spot the change (watch those inverted commas carefully).

From untruly accusing me writing the precise words ‘ “squawking women” ’(a direct falsehood and a demonstrably invented quotation), they moved to claiming that I had referred to ‘ “squawking” women’, which suggests that, though I did not actually say the words, I meant them. Or perhaps it suggests that a longer quotation could be represented as my using the adjective ‘squawking’ to refer to the noun 'women'.

There is no such quotation. I never said it. Nor can the headline be said to suggest it. There has been some attempt to say that the headline excuses this. It does not. The headline ‘What will women gain from all this squawking about sex pests? A niqab’ does not, by any use of grammar, attach the word’ squawking’ to the word ‘women’. A headline could equally ask What will children gain from all this squawking about nurseries?’ . It would not mean that children had been doing the squawking. The connection of ‘squawking’ to ‘women’ is in the minds of the Guardian staff who made it.

‘This article was amended on 10 and 15 November 2017. An earlier version misdescribed Carwyn Jones as the head of the Welsh assembly and suggested that Peter Hitchens’ column included the exact phrase “squawking women”.’

Slippery, eh? All they’re prepared to admit, and then only by implication, is that I didn’t use the exact phrase ‘squawking women’.

In some ways this is a worse failing than the original, which could have been charitably explained by sheer sloppiness. By the time they made this alteration, they were well aware that i had not used the words, and could produce plentiful evidence that I have often used the adjective 'squawking' in a wholly gender-free way.

When I attempted to make a formal complaint about their handling of their error, to the Guardian ‘Readers’ Editor’, it was at first ignored. I had to send it several times before I received a snotty response more or less telling me that it was my own fault if people misunderstood what I said. This is a tenable position in a pub argument, though not a good or respectable one in a national newspaper, and I do not think the Guardian would much like it if others applied the same rule to its own pages. It certainly doesn’t accord with C.P. Scott’s immortal dictum that facts are sacred. But given the Guardian’s adherence to the old Press Complaints Commission code, which is against inaccuracy, it doesn’t deal with the real problem, which is that the Guardian published something inaccurate about me and hasn't properly regretted it or corrected it.

Here's what the code says :

‘1 Accuracy i) The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures. ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published. iii) The press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.’

However, in this case, it is beyond doubt that the Guardian claims that I wrote something I did not write, whereas in the Bell case it had no hard legal obligation - only a moral one, since Bell was deceased - to distinguish between an allegation and a proven charge. ‘Only’ a moral obligation? Well, you know what I mean.

The problems in both cases could have been avoided if those involved had read their material more carefully.

And that brings me to the comments on bicycle helmets, about which I wrote here

Many of those commenting seemed to think I was urging people *not* to wear helmets. I did not and do not. If people think they are useful, then I would be the last person to urge them to cease. But much of the justification for them comes from untestable claims such as the one made by Mr Meredith ‘ I am certain that wearing one that day saved me from serious head injuries.’ Similar remarks are often made by doctors in news reports of cycle accidents. I don’t doubt his certainty, or theirs, but I am honestly unsure how anyone can know this, except perhaps that, as Alf Garnett used to say 'it stands to reason'.

He also says, rather annoyingly ‘Mr Hitchins' (sic) argument seems to be that my collision was - in part at least - caused by my helmet lulling the driver into a false sense of my invulnerability and that because of this he was somehow persuaded to drive into me. This can't be true because the reality is that he did not see me at all, so cannot have known whether I was helmeted or not.’

Indeed, it cannot be true in this case, which is why I have advanced no such argument. He appears to have been the victim of 'Invisible Bicycle Syndrome', a curious but widespread complaint, uninfluenced by any amount of lights and reflective gear, against which cyclists should always be on their guard.

I cannot know the details of his accident. I do not know how, where or at what speed he was riding or on what sort of road. I know nothing of how the car came to hit him. But the general point, that drivers are more careless of helmeted cyclists, has been demonstrated by research http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/5334208.stm

As for cyclists, I am often amazed by the risks taken in front of me by other cyclists, and the speeds at which they ride, which I might risk on a deserted country road in perfect visibility, but never in traffic. Without exception, these risk-takers are wearing bicycling battledress. Often they are also encumbered with headphones, a near-suicidal acts when your hearing is one of your principal safeguards against danger from behind. Indeed, the very common helmet-headphone combination often causes me to think that the rider would be safer without both than with both. Nobody truly concerned with his own safety would use headphones while riding a bicycle in traffic. I would cheerfully make it illegal. In fact an enforced ban on cycling with headphones would, in my view, be a far better aim for safety enthusiuasts than a law compelling helmets.

Bill’ is among those Clarksonising about the (non-existent) road tax . he says : ‘Consider: If there were no roads nobody would own a car, so there would be no vehicle excise duty, no road tax, no fuel tax and no VAT on these "good" things. Motorists pay these imposts only because there is an implied social contract that the receipts will be used to build and maintain roads.

Without them there would be no roads, merely the rutted tracks of the horse-and-buggy era.’

See above for the falsehood of this claim, but also he should be aware that most cyclists also maintain cars, pay fuel tax etc. There is certainly no matching ‘implied social contract’ which exempts me from paying for roads,, though I have not driven on any British road for some years, hate motorways and would much prefer the money to be spent on reviving the railways.

In fact, as a railway season-ticket holder I pay substantially (from taxed income) for our very badly-managed pseudo-private railway system. The considerable rises in fares of recent years, imposed on those of us who choose not to clog the roads with cars, have freed the Treasury to spend much more of the money we have already paid in tax on its preferred transport method, roads. Let is also not forget the question of damage. Cars inflict far more damage on the roads and bridges they use than do cyclists. Shouldn’t their drivers and owners help to pay for this?

‘JPT’ is one of many people here and on Twitter who have found a passage, presumably in invisible ink, in my article, which urges people not to wear helmets. No such passage exists. Yet he feels moved to write

‘A wildly irresponsible article.

If, for any reason, a cyclist comes off their bike and hits their head, wearing a helmet will massively increase the chance that they escape death or a massive head injury. A helmet is not only useful if you're travelling at 4mph. Referring to helmets as Styrofoam bowls which are easy to leave behind is an embarrassingly poor description of a practical tool which may save your life.’

The inadequacy of these helmets is a vital part of my point. If drivers and cyclists alike realised this was the case, both might behave better. I notice that almost none of my critics acknowledges or mentions my unequivocal and prominent condemnation of irresponsible cycling. I am sure that the huge increase in reckless and superfast riding in traffic has followed the introduction of battledress for cyclists.

Our behaviour is undoubtedly changed by what we wear. If you ride a bicycle in normal clothes, you will be much less likely to treat the streets of an English town like the route of the Tour de France. I am amazed by the speeds I see. Even with the best possible brakes, it is hard to stop a two-wheeled machine quickly without risk. Yet on busy roads , conditions can change utterly in a matter of seconds. I think the false sense of invulnerability conferred by a helmet has much to do with the behaviour. If wearers and drivers alike understood that it was false, they might be more careful.

Mr Martin jeers ‘PH could be onto something here. Helmets cause cyclists to take more risks? That explains why there are so many idiots driving cars, because they wear seat belts, making them feel invulnerable. Let's overturn the law on compulsory seat belt wearing.’

Actually, his intended sneer is a good point. Has he heard of the Third World Taxi-Driver test? It goes like this.

You emerge from a third world airport late at night. Furious traffic honks and teems. Waiting at the kerb are two taxis. In one, the driver has an airbag, a safety harness and a helmet (the passenger seats of both vehicles, of course, are devoid of such things). In the other, the driver has no belt or airbag or helmet, and there is a sharp spike in the centre if the steering wheel. Which taxi do you take? It’s very easy.

It’s just a way of reminding us of the truth that the safer a driver feels about himself, the more careless he is about others. Since the introduction of inertia-reel belts, ABS brakes, airbags, anchored child-seats and Side Impact Protection, I have noticed that driving in this country has grown far more violent - violent acceleration, violent braking, sudden swerves. It’s bearable if you’re the driver or the front-seat passenger, but pretty horrible for back-seat passengers and terrifying for other road users.

They stay out of the way. The reason for the decline in road deaths, I believe is partly that those in cars are now so well-protected and partly that other road users, especially children on the way to school, have vanished. Now they too go by car, as their parents fear to let them loose on the seething, angry roads – and who can blame them?

Typical preachy attitude of southern smuggies or (even worse) inner-city 'greenie' types. If shifted to rural northern areas where the weather's worse, there are proper hills, far less readily accessible facilities and public transport is scant (or less) without a car, then reality might soon induce you adopt a rather different perspective on the matter.’

Ah, he must be referring to the invisible bit of the article, which I did not write, which says that I think other people should be made to follow my example and go to work on a bike in the rain. I believe Guardian writers and editors are also able to see this passage. As I have said many times before, and will no doubt have to repeat many times in future, our country – in cities and countryside - has been designed for cars and drivers for 50 years at least, and it is often very difficult not to be forced into a car by that. But this is an argument for changing that policy, not least by restoring railway branch lines and encouraging cycling.

I know I am fortunate to be able to live in a place where I do not need a car., I am very well aware of the difficulties faced by others and said nothing which suggested I wasn’t. By the way, there are real hills in the south, and bad weather, too, and I tackle both of them on my bicycle.

26 November 2017 12:32 AM

Daily I risk death or serious injury on the roads, simply because I ride a bicycle. I know the danger, but I’d rather face it than box myself in a car.

I have many reasons for this. I think cars spoil our countryside and our towns, cloud the air with filth and noise, and make us horribly dependent on Middle Eastern despotisms for fuel. I also think there’s no quicker way of transforming a decent person into a power-crazed selfish maniac than to put him behind the wheel of a car.

And I’ve found over time that cycling is good for me, at least for as long as it doesn’t actually kill me. In fact cars, like cigarettes, are one of the very few products which, used according the makers’ instructions, will damage the user’s health.

Heart disease, lower back pain and depression can all be traced to the lack of simple regular exercise which almost always accompanies car use.I’ve driven cars in the vicious madness of Moscow traffic and on the vast freeways of California, and I hate the responsibility. One small slip in concentration, and imagine how much damage you can do.

Now it seems I am to be punished for my rejection of the sacred car, by being ordered to wear body-armour while I bicycle.

A silly Minister, Jesse Norman, has launched a ‘review’ that will ‘consider’ the mandatory wearing of cycle helmets.

I’ve tried these things. Have you ever looked at one? A bowl of Styrofoam with a thin plastic coating, wildly expensive to buy, easy to leave behind on a train, which might conceivably save you from injury if you fell off at 4mph. Otherwise? Not much.

It’s quite useful in a hailstorm. But it won’t save you if a 45-ton lorry decides to turn across your path, or if a water-filled pothole deeper than it looks (there are more and more of these, and Mr Norman’s Transport Department seems unable to do anything about it) sends you sprawling in front of a bus.

More important, drivers think a rider in a helmet is invulnerable – so they treat him worse than they otherwise would. Research has shown that drivers steer dangerously closer to helmeted cyclists than to those without headgear.

A bike helmet is not a device to make cyclists safer. It is a device for making drivers feel safer while driving selfishly. Far too many motorists want cyclists to be wholly responsible for their own safety, so they don’t need to bother taking care. Many of their minds have been poisoned by Clarksonite rubbish about how we ‘don’t pay road tax’. Oh yes, we do.

In the Netherlands, where everyone understands that bicycling is a sensible, clean, quiet, healthy way to travel, you hardly ever see a bike helmet at all. It’s not the cycling that’s dangerous, you see. It’s the other road users who won’t show consideration.

As for cyclists themselves, yes, I know that quite a few of them are very stupid. I hate what they do just as much as anyone. And I notice that it is those most kitted out in headgear and battledress who take the most risks. Donning the Styrofoam bowl makes far too many riders think they are immortal as well as righteous. Watch the red-light jumpers. Most of them will be wearing helmets.

If this idea becomes law, the only result will be that, as happened in Australia, even fewer people will ride bicycles, especially the hire bikes that are now becoming increasingly common. Once again, we are planning to pass the law of unintended consequences.

******

At last a menacing and sinister figure departs from the international stage and into retirement, not a moment too soon. No, not you, Mr Mugabe. I was referring to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. Goodbye and good riddance.

*******

What good is a church without justice?

As Mrs Merton might have asked: ‘So, Archbishop Welby, why have you now sat for 50 whole days on a report which says the Church of England did a wrong and unjust thing?’

I am repeatedly disgusted by the way in which our country has forgotten the basic rules of English justice. And I have written before here about the case of George Bell, the saintly and brave Bishop of Chichester who repeatedly risked unpopularity rather than remain silent about wrongdoing. If only there were more like him. He died in 1958, much mourned. Yet two years ago, on the basis of a single uncorroborated accusation made many decades after the alleged crime, the Church of England publicly denounced him as a child abuser.

Somehow, the allegation became a conviction and was blazed abroad on the BBC and in several newspapers which should have known better. Despite huge publicity nationally and locally, no other accusation has been made in the years since.

I had long revered Bell’s memory, and, with several allies, sought to get justice for him. We found that he had been convicted by a slapdash and inconsiderate kangaroo court.

They made no serious effort to consult Bell’s huge archive (or his biographer, who knew his way around it) to check the claims against it. They never found or warned Bell’s living niece, Barbara Whitley, who was astonished and appalled to see her uncle suddenly smeared in public, and is still livid.

They never looked for or consulted Adrian Carey, Bell’s personal chaplain, who lived in the Bishop’s Palace at the time of the supposed crimes. We did. Until the day he died, Canon Carey rejected the charges as baseless and impossible.

The Church’s main response was to accuse us, quite falsely, of attacking the complainant, which we never did. Then, very grudgingly, it announced a review. Then, with glacial slowness, it appointed a QC, Lord Carlile, to undertake it. Lord Carlile delivered his report on October 7. You can imagine what it says. The C of E is still making excuses for not publishing it. How quick they were to condemn another. How slow they are to admit their own fault.

Publish it now.

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Moving proof of what fame is really worth

How much are fame and glamour, now the golden currency of the modern world, really worth? One answer is to be found in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, starring Annette Bening and Jamie Bell.

I was astonished by this account, based on the true story of the last weeks of the life of the once-famous Gloria Grahame. Millions have seen her play the beguilingfloozy, Violet Bick, rescued from a sordid future in It’s A Wonderful Life.

They couldn’t imagine the fairly grim slow-motion shipwreck which followed – broken marriages, shrinking fame, sickness and scandal – or guess that the siren who once shared the screen with Humphrey Bogart was a half- English girl who really longed to play Shakespeare. The end, in a very modest Liverpool terrace house, is a kind of redemption, and rather moving, but it wasn’t a wonderful life.

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Those who now bloviate moralistically about Russian wickedness would be wise to listen - it’s still available here

This was the era when we and the USA were hiring mobs, newspapers and generals to overthrow the Iranian government (one of those involved ended up as a Tory MP), which is why we’re still unpopular there. Of course, we never do that sort of thing now.

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12 November 2017 1:38 AM

Anyone who texts while driving a car is a deliberate killer. He or she knows the risks and can be said to have the intent to kill. The only thing that separates this from murder is that the killer does not care whether or who he kills. He knows his action could be fatal, and he still does it. If he fails to kill anyone, he is morally no different from a would-be murderer who shoots but misses.

If we ever did have the sense to restore the death penalty, I would be happy to see it applied to such persons, for example to Peter Morrison, whose moronic, selfish, savage behaviour killed Highways England traffic officer Adam Gibb and paralysed his colleague Paul Holroyd. These good men were out in filthy weather, trying to clear up after another crash.

Morrison was driving his show-off Mercedes car at an average speed of 81mph on the M6 in rain so heavy one witness said it was like being in a car wash. Yet he was seen shooting past other cars ‘like a missile’. The killer, convicted last week of causing death by dangerous driving, admitted his use of a phone at the wheel was ‘unwise’.

But he denied it was dangerous. While he did this ghastly thing, he was preoccupied with football, sending 25 WhatsApp messages in 17 minutes – one 96 seconds before he slewed off the road to kill Mr Gibb and ruin many other lives besides. Could this ‘happen to anyone’? I do not think so. But something like it could ‘happen’ to someone you know, today. And someone else you know could be killed or terribly injured as a result.

Every day, I still see people on their phones while driving. And if I reprove them, they jeer that I can do nothing about it because the police don’t care, which is true. Does anyone in this country not yet know that it is dangerous to text while driving? Is there the remotest excuse for this? Even at 20mph, those who do it risk killing or injuring a child on a suburban road. What will stop them doing it?

It makes me so angry that I am tempted to suggest a few public hangings at motorway services, with the killers’ heads left to rot on spikes along the central reservation, Game Of Thrones style. But even I recognise this is going a bit far. Let us compromise on the reintroduction of police traffic patrols, which have vanished as totally as police foot patrols. Speed cameras do not remotely make up for their disappearance.

And they have disappeared. A friend of mine recently drove from London to Glasgow and did not see one patrol car. I am sure this is quite typical. I know they are busy painting their nails and doing Gay Pride parades, but couldn’t they spare a few hours for this task as well? It is no good making the fines bigger and bigger, as we keep doing,

if people are confident they will never be caught. If the moron Morrison had been caught texting, and properly punished, he wouldn’t now be the broken, astonished creature he is, amazed at the consequences of his own folly and doubtless full of self-pity. And his victims would still be happy and healthy, and their families would not be devastated. Yet somehow it is nobody’s priority to do anything about this.

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Not long ago I jeered at Madame Tussauds for refusing to make an effigy of Theresa May. They had set themselves up as constitutional experts, and decided that a Prime Minister who had not been ‘elected’ did not deserve to be fashioned in wax. Of course, Prime Ministers are not elected, but get their power from Parliament, which is elected. Mrs May, since she went to the polls, has actually been much less of a Premier than she was before. And I bet she wishes that Tussauds had not bothered.

Her appearance there in meltable form has just led to more cruel jokes about how feeble and temporary she is. The image looks a good deal more cheerful and confident than the real thing. And so it is. The Government is itself a wax museum. It has no true purpose, except to follow a policy – exit from the EU – which most of its members dislike. Almost any determined lobby can, by squawking loudly enough, secure the sacking of any Cabinet Minister with the aid of bored media. Nothing lies ahead except embarrassment and bungling.

It is, I think, the end of the Tory Party, which was unwisely kept on life support by deluded voters and greedy donors when it should have been given decent burial a decade ago. Without some astonishing earthquake, a Corbyn government is coming and it is hard to see how it can be prevented. What is left of the Tories will no doubt adopt the policies of Mr Corbyn, as they adopted those of the Blairites, after a brief struggle with what they call their consciences.

They will do anything to get office. Well, what will you all do then, those of you who insisted on sticking to the Tories, and keeping them alive, however many times they betrayed you? It is precisely because the Tories believe in nothing that they are so useless. Get used to the idea that you now have no friends at all at Westminster. It has been so for years, but from now on it will be painfully obvious.

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If we cannot be sure that there is a special invisible bond between mothers and their children, then we cannot be certain about anything. But if this is so, how can we justify the current strident fashion for urging mothers to go out to work when their children are small? I was struck very deeply by one tiny piece of the reminiscences of Esther Rantzen’s daughter Rebecca Wilcox (who has chosen to stay at home with her own children).

It read: ‘As a toddler, my elder sister Emily used to wave Mum goodbye at the door and then go straight to her bedroom window overlooking the driveway, to watch for her return. ‘At the time Mum was never told about this daily vigil, but, looking back now, she admits it breaks her heart.’ Shouldn’t it break all our hearts? And if not, shouldn’t it make us wonder if we are pursuing a wise and good policy?

Most women go out to work because they have to, not because glamorous jobs in TV await them.

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How ridiculous to put a statue of George Orwell, author of 1984 and stickler for clear truthful English, outside the BBC’s HQ. Orwell was a leftist, beyond doubt. But he was also a patriot. And he was not the sort of soupy, evasive, jargon -encrusted leftist who flourishes at the BBC. He didn’t like the Corporation when he did work for it, long before it became the shameless liberal propaganda organ it is now. In fact, if a real live Orwell were with us now, I don’t think they would welcome him.

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I remember when breakfast on a train was a feast and a treat, miraculously perfect eggs, bacon and toast prepared in a tiny galley and served with immaculate style on linen tablecloths. It’s gone for ever, and people have to bring their own. But could they please not be like my neighbour on the Cambridge to London express the other day, and eat horrible vegan snacks which fill the whole carriage with the aroma of pickled cabbage stewed in Marmite?

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27 August 2017 1:00 AM

Why do we hate and despise each other so much these days? If they really do plan to prosecute hate speech, they’ll have to turn the Hebrides into a gulag to hold all the offenders.Let’s begin with the strange lack of remorse shown by the cyclist Charlie Alliston, after he crashed into the much missed wife and mother Kim Briggs.It would have helped Mr Alliston in court and in life to have at least appeared to be sorry. But he was so sure he was in the right that it doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind, and now it is too late. He didn’t have a front brake on his bike. He doesn’t seem to have any brakes on his self-esteem either.I am afraid of people like Charlie Alliston. I ride a bicycle daily in London, and have done for many years. These days I venture out armoured with a horrible suspicion and mistrust of all my fellow road-users. I fear crazy cyclists just as much as I fear inconsiderate drivers. They are like cultists, dressed up like huge insects in dehumanising uniforms, so sure they are saving the planet that they care little for its inhabitants.Sometimes I catch up with them and rebuke them after they have shot through a red light. They have only one response and I think you can guess what it is. It is the two word motto of modern Britain, beginning and ending with the letter ‘f’. Alas, the campaign for new cycling laws won’t work. The absent police won’t enforce them. People need to restrain themselves.This is not just about cyclists. It’s about all of us. Remember the mystery jogger who barged a woman out of the way, shoving her into the path of a bus? He knew he was right, and he wasn’t sorry. And then ask yourself (as I do, and the answer is not a happy one), do you ever act as if your own needs and pleasures were supreme, as if your private bubble was all that mattered?The scorn and remorselessness goes both ways. For every cyclist who jumps a red light, a thousand drivers break speed limits or gape dangerously at their smartphones while driving. If you do this and haven’t yet killed anyone’s wife and mother, it’s not to your credit. You’ve just been lucky. And the callous dislike of one group for another is general. It is not just raucous, hairy-chested Clarkson types who loathe cyclists as much as Charlie Alliston seems to despise pedestrians. Matthew Parris, favourite voice of the self-regarding middle classes, celebrated Christmas 2007 by suggesting brightly: ‘A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists.’Gosh, how amusing. It wouldn’t take much effort to have this sort of thing called ‘cyclophobia’ and persuade the Crown Prosecution Service to classify it as a hate crime. Actually, this stuff happens on the roads because they are now the only places where we meet strangers. Our atomised country keeps us all in small solitudes with our backs turned on each other. We aren’t really a society any more, just a mass of individuals hurtling through the day bent on our own business – in some cases, literally bent over screens as we amble heedlessly along. Heaven protect anyone who gets in our way.I suspect this has a lot to do with the steady erosion of family and neighbourhood as influences on us, as we become increasingly dependent on the State, and plugged into our own individual choices of pleasure and entertainment. How often do you now hear people saying that what they do is nobody else’s concern? What is it to you, they ask, what I do with my own body? Quite a lot, as it happens. I was invited on to Talk Radio to discuss yet another call to legalise cannabis. How daft. This drug’s users risk mental illness, and so risk making their families miserable for the rest of their lives. Shortly before cutting me off abruptly in mid-sentence, the radio presenter, James Whale, pronounced: ‘I really don’t care what anybody does as long as they don’t involve me or anybody who does not actually want to be involved.’But the kind of person who thinks this often doesn’t notice that he is affecting other people. For instance, I expect there are many unhinged cyclists who don’t notice the dismay of those they sweep past as they sail through red lights. And there are plenty of them who ride idiotically with no front brake, and so far haven’t actually hit anybody while they were doing it. So far. But their behaviour, like a thousand other selfish activities, affects us all, and we should not have to wait till a beloved wife and mother is lying dead in the middle of the road before we grasp that this war of everyone against everyone else is wrong. No man is an island.

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Speaking of red lights, I note that the body I still call NICE thinks pelican crossings don’t allow enough time for the old and frail to get across. Indeed they don’t. But this is only half the problem. Many of them now take an age to respond to the button. I know some where you wait so long for the light to change that you’re in serious danger of having to pay council tax. Yet the old zebra crossings required drivers to stop as soon as a pedestrian set foot on them. The new ones, for all their bleeping and flashing, liberate drivers and imprison pedestrians at the roadside. And they wonder why nobody walks anywhere.

Was The State shocking? No, just a silly flop

Channel 4’s drama The State – about British recruits heading to Syria to sign up with Islamic State – was, in the end, a flop and an evasion. I doubt if anyone will be encouraged to join IS by it. But so what? It has to be judged in other ways.Above all, it couldn’t explain why any educated, aware, intelligent British Muslims would have hurried to Raqqa. Dim, hate-filled fanatics wouldn’t have been surprised by the medieval subjection of women, the slavery, the head-chopping and the indoctrination of children, as so many of the programme’s characters were. They would have welcomed it. That’s what they went there for.And why would someone, who had been so appalled by Islamic State in practice that she risked her life to get away, object to a request from MI5 to report on IS activity in her community back in Britain? This silly scene was just Channel 4 being its teenage Leftist self. Those who join these movements aren’t, for the most part, the educated, idealistic types we were shown here. They are criminal low-lifes, violent, spiteful, ignorant and permanently damaged by drugs. Again, you’d need a microscope to notice it, but the alleged ringleader of the Barcelona gang, Abdelbaki Es Satty, had done time for dope smuggling, and dope paraphernalia was found at the ‘safe house’ in Ripoll, used by the supposed driver of the death van, Younes Abouyaaqoub.

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So, here we go back to Afghanistan, to make war on the people we armed and trained, 30 years ago, to drive the Soviets out of… Afghanistan. Neither the West nor the Soviets ever really explained why they were there in the first place, and it’s still a mystery to me. How much time and trouble, and lives, we’d all have saved if we’d never gone there at all.

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06 August 2017 2:00 AM

Speed bumps are solidified selfishness. They are there because far too many drivers refuse to be careful or considerate. I don’t like them, but if they go, we’ll have to have something else.I’d recommend taking those largely useless speed cameras away from main roads, and putting them on every suburban street instead, set at 20mph.

For a few months they’d make millions in fines. Then people might just change their behaviour. I seethe with rage when I see the way normal, kindly, considerate people hurtle heedlessly down such roads at 30 or 40 miles an hour at the wheel of a ton of steel, rubber and glass. What if a small child runs out into the road, which is almost always cluttered by parked cars these days?

Do they have any idea what might then happen?

Of how, without warning, they could be standing grey-faced at the roadside pleading with the paramedics for reassurance that their victim is going to be all right, and getting silence in return?

They act as if they don’t have any such idea. And yet, as I say, these are otherwise good people. Why is this?I suspect it is because it is absolutely true that power tends to corrupt – and for most of us, the biggest taste of power we get is when we slide behind the wheel of a car. The car advertisements sell us the idea that, cradled in our shiny toy, we need only to touch the gas pedal to be roaring along deserted roads.

The dreary truth, that most car journeys are slower than going by bicycle, waiting for lights, waiting at junctions, waiting for pedestrians to cross the road, crawling past roadworks, is hard to bear. Even if you’re in a Lamborghini, and most of us are not, you can rarely use the power you have.

So at the first hint of an even slightly open road, even if it’s a suburban street, down goes the foot. This is fairly new. Until quite recently, the average family car accelerated like a pensioner. Its brakes were feeble. The absence of seatbelts and airbags meant a likely journey to hospital via the windscreen if anything went wrong. But modern cars make selfishness safer, and offer temptations those sluggish old Hillmans and Austins never had.

And that is why we ended up with speed bumps. Because too many people drove angrily and selfishly, and the large part of the population who don’t drive quite reasonably didn’t like it.

The trouble was, the speed bumps just made them angrier, so they drove even more foolishly when there were no bumps.

If you don’t want speed bumps or speed cameras, just imagine what it would be like to hit a child at the speed you’re doing.

And slow down.

A Razor-sharp expose of our broken society

One of the greatest men of our age is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple. For decades he worked in a major British jail, listening to the excuses and self-justifications of people who had done terrible things to others, and to themselves.

Refusing to follow fashion, and genuinely concerned for these often very sad characters, he treated them as adults, urging them to take responsibility for their actions instead of offering excuses for them.

Many, who had come to despise authority, were glad to be up against someone they could not easily fool.

My guess is that many of those he treated benefited greatly from his tough-minded approach. He didn’t fill them with pills or substitute one drug for another.

His observations of the way heroin abusers feign terrible discomfort, after arriving in prison and being deprived of their drug, is both funny and a badly needed corrective to conventional wisdom.

All this is to be found in a short, hugely readable new book called The Knife Went In.

The title, a quotation from an actual murderer, is an example of the way such people refuse to admit they had any part in the crimes they commit. The knife somehow got there and went into the victim, by itself.

It is a series of short, gripping real-life stories in which he recounts his experiences with our broken, lying penal system with its fake prison sentences, its ridiculous form-filling as a substitute for action.

It is mainly about prisons and crime, but it tells a deep truth about the sort of society we have become. It is one in which almost nobody is, or wants to be, responsible for anything.

A future historian, a century hence, will learn more about 21st Century Britain from this book than from any official document. So will you. Please read it.

Is this serious?

Isn’t ‘security’ a joke? If we really faced imminent doom from Islamic State, would this armedto- the-teeth robocop have time to enjoy a laugh with the ladies of Goodwood?

Of course not. He’d be scanning the crowd incessantly for danger. As it is, what are he and his colleagues even doing there? Security excuses stupidity.

As far as I know, British holidaymakers played no part in recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Indeed, you can travel between these two cities without a passport. I’ve done it, as have many drug-addled Islamist fanatics.

So why are these outrages the excuse for forcing thousands of British holidaymakers to stand in airport passport queues for long, miserable hours?

Why do we accept this drivel so meekly?

The REAL villain behind your surging electricity bill

I feel sorry for British Gas, attacked for raising the price of electricity. I still find it confusing a gas company sells electricity, but the facts are quite simple.

British Gas and the other power companies are raising charges because we have a mad Government. Under New Labour’s unhinged Climate Change Act, backed by the Tories and virtually unopposed in Parliament, we are steering straight into an iceberg.

Perfectly good coal-fired power stations all over the country are being shut down and blown up so they can’t be reopened, because of crazed Green regulations.

In some cases, they are being converted to burning wood chips imported from the USA. If this did any good (which is, er, unproven) it would be immediately cancelled out by the huge number of new coal-fired power stations recently built in India and China.

Our nuclear generators are slowly dying. Plans to replace them are hopelessly behind. The Government assumed that the growing gap between what we use and what we generate would be met by new gas-fired stations, but nobody has built them.

So instead, it hopes to meet the need with French nuclear electricity brought under the Channel, which we can’t rely on if the French need it more; and on power generated by wind, which doesn’t blow all the time, and sun which doesn’t shine all the time.

And it is the cost of subsidising the sun and wind power which is forcing up electricity prices. So is the need to link remote windmills expensively to the grid. There’s also the cost of setting up special parks of diesel generators to prevent power cuts if all else fails.

Diesel? Yes, the devilish fuel we’re trying to drive off the roads could be what saves you from a Christmas blackout.

Currently, the Green levy, the main reason for the latest price rise, makes up at least £73 of an average £562 annual electricity bill. It’s going to go up a lot more. I think the power companies should put this on their bills in big letters. Then Parliament might be forced to rethink its mad warmist dogma, and follow a sane power policy.

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30 July 2017 2:04 AM

Just after the last crash, in November 2008, the Queen asked a roomful of academics and economists why they hadn’t seen it coming. She won’t have to do that next time. This week the klaxons started to sound. Another crash is on the way.And so if you wake up one morning and the cashpoint machines are empty, and there are long, angry queues outside famous high street banks, you, the Queen and the Government will have no excuse for being surprised.The warning came very clearly from Alex Brazier, a director of the Bank of England, in a speech in Liverpool that ought to have been on every front page and at the top of every broadcast news bulletin.For if he is right, all the controversies, from the EU to Donald Trump, that fill the bulletins will shrivel into nothing pretty soon. Of course he did not put it quite like that. He has to be cautious. He said: ‘Household debt – like most things that are good in moderation – can be dangerous in excess. Dangerous to borrowers, lenders and, most importantly from our perspective, everyone else in the economy.’ And then he noted that consumer credit has recently increased more than six times as fast as incomes. There is no real money to cover this. It’s a gamble on the future being just like the present. It is very similar to the dangerous sub-prime mortgages that infected the Western financial system with impossible debt ten years ago. He warned of a ‘spiral of complacency’. As loans become easier to get, more money is lent on easier terms. ‘The spiral continues, and borrowers rack up more and more debt. Lending standards can go from responsible to reckless very quickly. The sorry fact is that, as lenders think the risks they face are falling, the risks they – and the wider economy – face are actually growing.’It’s not just maxed-out credit cards, though debts of this kind are now huge. There’s a big new danger. If some of your neighbours have recently acquired shiny, big new cars, they may be part of the problem. Great fleets of such cars are pouring out of showrooms thanks to easy-money loans called Personal Contract Purchase (PCP). Almost four new cars in every five are now bought through these PCPs. Put simply, this postpones the main final ‘balloon’ payment for as long as four years. If, at the end, the buyer can’t pay, he can just hand the car back and walk away. Can you see how risky this is for the lender? The money comes from the finance arms of the car companies, not usually from banks themselves, but if used car prices fall, as is quite possible, the whole thing goes down the drain. And that might spread to the banks and the rest of the economy. Mr Brazier warned: ‘The banks that are involved, as well as the shareholders of car companies, will want to think very carefully about the risks.’Or will they? Experience suggests that lenders don’t want to think about this at all. So if they won’t, Chancellor Philip Hammond and the rest of the Cabinet should be thinking very hard indeed about what to do if it all comes crashing down one day, and farmers’ fields are full of used SUVs that nobody knows what to do with. They’ll say it came out of the blue, but it won’t have done. It’s about as predictable as next autumn, and may not be much further away. We have been warned, and if the Government isn’t ready with a plan, then I’m not sure what will save it from the wrath to come.

The BBC has grim doubts about 'happy pills'

The BBC’s Panorama programme was attacked last week by the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists for alleged ‘scaremongering’. Why?This gripping, tragic and carefully researched piece of work explored the mass murder of 12 people in a Colorado cinema, five years ago. It found that the killer – previously a shy, peaceable and awkward student – had undergone a huge personality change after being prescribed increasing doses of ‘antidepressant’ pills. He suddenly became a gun enthusiast, his academic work went down the drain. He dyed his hair orange. He began making crude sexual remarks to women. Now, varying personality changes are not all that uncommon in people who are prescribed these pills, as any careful reader of the newspapers will know. Sometimes they are mild, sometimes they are large. But they do suggest a problem that needs addressing. The programme was careful not to say the pills caused the murders. How could we know? Proving that A caused B is, oddly enough, one of the most difficult tasks in science. But this is by no means the only case of a person taking ‘antidepressants’ going very badly off the rails. Add to that the discovery a few years ago that the pill companies had (quite legally) suppressed their own research, showing their products were not as effective as claimed, and what do you have? You have a case for a thorough inquiry into the whole thing. It is not ‘scaremongering’ to ask for one and I’m very glad Panorama has brought this important subject right into the mainstream of debate. Others please copy.

There are many odd or baffling things about the BBC’s expletive-strewn new detective series, Top Of The Lake: China Girl. The first is Nicole Kidman, playing a ‘latelife lesbian’ who has apparently had an accident with the Australian national grid which has turned her hair into a vast scouring pad. The second is the ultra-modish actress Elisabeth Moss, beloved by Left-wing critics despite the fact that she is a Scientologist (would they even write about her, let alone praise her, if she were an active Christian?). But above all, it is the portrayal of all men as weak, porncorrupted, slobbish and ignorant. This is not accidental. It is not balanced elsewhere on the BBC. Why is it not condemned as bias?

Let's change the Tories name - to Doris

I suspect the whole ‘Trans’ issue has been cooked up so that nobody can ever say anything about it (including here) without being somehow in the wrong, and open to attack by the Thought Police. Now that there’s no more mileage in homosexuality, it’s the best way of making conservatives look like bigots.But those of you who have clung to the Tory Party through thick and thin must have wondered a bit last week when it endorsed the idea that anyone can be whatever sex, sorry ‘gender’, that they want to be. Here’s the simple explanation. The Tory Party itself has changed sex, from Right to Left. It is a ‘Trans’ party. I’m puzzled that it has yet to change its name. How about ‘Doris’? And it now feels free to come out. Yet still you vote for it.

Prisons

Those of us who worry about the terrible state of our prisons fear all the time that there will be huge blazing riots like those of 1990. But could it be that what we face is one long riot, all across the system, never quite bad enough to be a major national scandal? More and more brave officers are badly injured. More and more prisoners are violently attacked, or kill themselves in despair. Add all these horrible events together, and it is much worse than the Strangeways outbreak of 1990 and the others that followed. If anyone in government is interested, I can explain what’s wrong and how to fix it. See here

05 February 2017 1:03 AM

In British public life, nothing succeeds like failure, provided you belong to the Blessed Company of the Politically Correct. We learn from media leaks that two politically correct women, Cressida Dick, pictured right and Sara Thornton, pictured below, in hat, are on the final shortlist for the post of Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Although we are supposed not to care any longer what sex anyone is, those in charge of this appointment no doubt long to choose the ‘first woman’ to hold the job. And if they do, they will be applauded wildly by the Left-wing establishment. I am more interested in whether these people are up to the job, regardless of sex, which is surely the truly anti-sexist position. Let’s see what happens. Whoever holds this post has a huge and lasting influence over policing throughout the country. He or she will have the ear of Ministers and immense media access. Other forces will strive to copy what they do. But if either Ms Dick or Ms Thornton were politically incorrect white-skinned males, I do not think they would be in the competition at all. No doubt both are perfectly pleasant people, well educated and charming. They are beloved by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, have been decorated with medals and invited to Royal occasions. But both are personally linked to gigantic and undoubted police failures. Ms Dick was ‘Gold Commander’ in charge of the 2005 ‘operation’ in which the wholly innocent Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead on the London Underground after officers wrongly assumed he was a terrorist. After this she was repeatedly promoted to higher positions before being transferred to the Foreign Office for some lofty function.Ms Thornton was in charge of Thames Valley Police when they were inexcusably slow to act against a gang of men who subjected several young girls to appalling sexual abuse in Oxford. In March 2015, Maggie Blyth, of the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board, who had compiled a report on the episode, said: ‘It is shocking that these children were subjected to such appalling sexual exploitation for so long.’ She spoke of ‘a culture across all organisations that failed to see that these children were being groomed in an organised way by groups of men’. Ms Thornton responded: ‘We are ashamed of the shortcomings identified in this report and we are determined to do all we can to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.’No doubt. But, like Ms Dick’s problems, it did not affect her climb to the top. Asked if she had considered resigning, she said: ‘The focus has got to be moving forward. I think the focus for me is on driving improvements in the future.’ By then she was already on her way to take up a post as head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council.I know little of Ms Thornton. I live in the area whose policing she used to head. Until this newspaper made a fuss, her organisation was reluctant to provide escorts for the hearses bearing dead soldiers home from Afghanistan, which passed through her area.But otherwise, it is no more absent and reactive than any other police ‘service’ I know of, which isn’t saying much. As for Ms Dick, she was on her way to the summit from the start. She was sent on a ‘national police high-flyers’ course’ in the 1980s. There she wrote a dissertation, arguing that ‘the way Lady Thatcher used the police to crush the miners had undermined public support, by creating the impression that the police had been reduced to the status of political tools’.

As a senior officer in Oxford, she preferred to withdraw rather than disperse demonstrators who had blocked a major road by holding an all-day rave. She said that there were children among the protesters and ‘although people were breaking the law and causing disruption we let it go ahead’. In 2002, as the Metropolitan Police ‘Diversity Director’, she launched a poster campaign in London urging the public to report to the police those whose views they found hateful.For many years I have tried to point out that the public don’t want or need this sort of policing, and long only for a force that is visible on the streets and deters the crime and disorder that now affect so many. Nobody listens, just as nobody listened to all the other points I and others patiently made for years about (for example) education, drugs, immigration and the EU. Those who ignore these warnings will, in the end, face an explosion of wrath which will make Donald Trump look like Woody Allen. And then, no doubt, they’ll all go out on petulant, sweary demonstrations complaining about the thing they have themselves helped to create. It’ll be too late.

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Bellowing at the wrong villain

Ministers and others continue to shout and squawk about Russia, a poor, weak country which is no threat to us, and which isn’t even especially interested in us. Is this because they lack the guts to tackle the giant, rich bully China, whose despots are entertained in Buckingham Palace?

I’ve seen no sign of any toughness over China’s blatant and lawless kidnap, from his Hong Kong home, of the billionaire Xiao Jianhua. Peking’s secret police appear to have waltzed across the border from the mainland and snatched him away. This is only the latest such incident, along with plenty of other crude and menacing interference in the former British colony.

China agreed in a solemn treaty in 1997 to respect Hong Kong as a separate territory until 2047. It seems to me they have decided we are now so weak they don’t need to bother.

Making militant and belligerent speeches about Russia is no substitute for real diplomatic courage.

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Hurrah for the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, like me a cyclist, for standing up to a bullying driver who treated him like a second-class citizen. She’s now been convicted and may face prison.

I think it’s thanks to another broadcasting Jeremy, this time Jeremy Clarkson, that so many drivers think cyclists ‘shouldn’t be on the road as they don’t pay road tax’. I’ve had this nonsense said to me by drivers who’ve treated me with similar dangerous bad manners.

Not all of them behave as badly as the woman who threatened Jeremy Vine. But they need to learn that cyclists pay just as much tax as they do, quite possibly more, and that they need space and consideration.

In my view, nobody should be allowed a driving licence until he has ridden a bike in city traffic and seen what his behaviour looks and feels like.

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Since Saving Private Ryan, war films have spared us very little of the gruesome truth about battle, which turns out to be disgusting and shameful and not glorious at all.

Now Mel Gibson’s new film Hacksaw Ridge confuses the matter even more, showing the exploits of a deeply Christian American, Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield), who volunteered to serve as a medic – but not fight – in the Pacific.

It’s based on a true story. Doss, portrayed left in the movie, wouldn’t carry a rifle into combat, but rescued an astonishing number of his wounded comrades from under Japanese guns.

He even saved Japanese lives. But as far as I could see, he would have saved more lives if he’d been willing to carry and use a firearm. And in any case his efforts were tiny compared to the vast butchery all around him.

It just made me wonder more than I ever had before, exactly why there was a war against Japan (which, until the Americans forced us apart in 1923, was Britain’s close ally).

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25 September 2016 12:57 AM

Here in my favourite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers. Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm. Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating. And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance. I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can. A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons. Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe. I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes. I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.

Syria's 'WMD moment': Don't be duped again

Almost everyone (barring a tiny knot of deluded losers) knows that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Most people now grasp that Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t planning a massacre in Benghazi or ordering his troops to engage in mass rapes.

How long will it be before we also grasp that neither Russia nor Syria bombed a UN aid convoy in Aleppo?

This incident, about which almost no independently testable, checkable facts have yet been produced, is the WMD of Syria. If we all fall for it, then we shall very soon find ourselves embroiled in the most dangerous international confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis.

Under immense pressure from the despots of Saudi Arabia, the USA will not give up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. It is clear that it is now prepared to risk an open confrontation with Moscow to achieve this. Why? Who do they think they are, and how can their cause be so good that they take such risks?

The deliberate sabotage of a workable peace deal in Syria (opposed from the start by the Pentagon) is one of the scandals of our age. There was a chance we might end the misery of millions, and it was thrown away.

We in Britain must resist being dragged into a Syrian war, not least because, if we are, it will not be long before any troops we send there are being hounded in their own country for alleged war crimes. We’ve been fooled enough by this propaganda. Don’t be bamboozled again.

We'll beat Corbyn with reason - not abuse

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it, including Corbyn.

Look, there are plenty of good arguments against Jeremy Corbyn, the best one being his absurd thought-free loathing for grammar schools. Some of the greatest socialists in this country, notably the 1930s Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson, and that fine teacher and socialist Eric James, realised that such schools helped the poor.

But please can people stop proclaiming that Labour cannot win an Election with Mr Corbyn at its head? It is such a stupid thing to say, that every time I hear it I want to beat my head against the nearest wall.

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England. And why on earth, after the 13-year catastrophe of the Blair government, do so many people seem so anxious to back the ghastly, dishonest Blairites against Mr Corbyn, who is at least open and honest about what he intends?

I personally prefer that to the conscious fraud practised by the Blairites and their Tory equivalents, the Cameroons, who pretended to be patriots and friends of the family, and turned out to be neither.

Mr Corbyn, as well as being generally right about foreign policy, actually confronts the issues that worry many people. His answers may be wrong, but if we listened to him and debated with him, instead of abusing him, this country and its people would benefit.

Freedom is all about being forced to listen to people we disagree with, and to defeat them (if we can) with facts and logic. The Corbyn abusers should try it.

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When will we learn that making new laws is useless unless we enforce them? It is no good having ‘tough’ laws against texting while driving unless lots of people are caught, prosecuted and punished for this.

Now car manufacturers, with breathtaking cynicism, are marketing new models with dashboard internet screens. This will undoubtedly mean more pointless deaths. My suggestion is that such cars should only be sold if the driver’s seatbelt and airbag are removed first, and that they should not be permitted to have any insurance apart from third party cover. Too many drivers think they are invulnerable. That is why they kill.

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